Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (3 page)

“Can’t you imagine some old monk or friar wandering about this long gallery?” No, I can’t.

I know Harrison Ainsworth could:
The Lancashire Witches
teems with Cistercians and what he calls votaresses in moldering vestments, who glide about passages to very little purpose. But these fail to impress. Not that I have not a soft corner in my heart for
The Lancashire Witches
, which—ridiculous as much of it is—has distinct merits as a story.

It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective, always supposing him to be the ghost of a dead person. Elementals and such-like do not come under this rule.

Roughly speaking, the ghost should be a contemporary of the seer. Such was the elder Hamlet and such Jacob Marley. The latter I cite with confidence and in despite of critics, for, whatever may be urged against some parts of
A Christmas Carol
, it is, I hold, undeniable that the introduction, the advent, of Jacob Marley is tremendously effective.

And be it observed that the setting in both these classic examples is contemporary and even ordinary. The ramparts of the Kronborg and the chambers of Ebenezer Scrooge were, to those who frequented them, features of everyday life.

But there are exceptions to every rule. An ancient haunting can be made terrible and can be invested with actuality, but it will tax your best endeavors to forge the links between past and present in a satisfying way. And in any case there must be ordinary level-headed modern persons—Horatios—on the scene, such as the detective needs his Watson or his Hastings to play the part of the lay observer.

Setting or environment, then, is to me a principal point, and the more readily appreciable the setting is to the ordinary reader the better. The other essential is that our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror.

Must there be horror? you ask. I think so. There are but two really good ghost stories I know in the language wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror. They are Lanoe Falconer’s “Cecilia de Noel” and Mrs. Oliphant’s “The Open Door.” In both there are moments of horror; but in both we end by saying with Hamlet: “Alas, poor ghost!” Perhaps my limit of two stories is overly strict; but that these two are by very much the best of their kind I do not doubt.

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence. There is a series of books I have read, I think American in origin, called
Not at Night
(and with other like titles), which sin glaringly against this law. They have no other aim than that of Mr. Wardle’s Fat Boy.

Of course, all writers of ghost stories do desire to make their readers’ flesh creep; but these are shameless in their attempts. They are unbelievably crude and sudden, and they wallow in corruption. And if there is a theme that ought to be kept out of the ghost story, it is that of the charnel house. That and sex, wherein I do not say that these
Not at Night
books deal, but certainly other recent writers do, and in so doing spoil the whole business.

To return from the faults of ghost stories to their excellence. Who, do I think, has best realized their possibilities? I have no hesitation in saying that it is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. In the volume called
In a Glass Darkly
are
four stories of paramount excellence, “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” and “Carmilla.” All of these conform to my requirements: the settings are quite different, but all
seen
by the writer; the approaches of the supernatural nicely graduated; the climax adequate. Le Fanu was a scholar and poet, and these tales show him as such. It is true that he died as long ago as 1873, but there is wonderfully little that is obsolete in his manner.

Of living writers I have some hesitation in speaking, but on any list that I was forced to compile the names of E.F. Benson. Blackwood, Burrage, De la Mare and Wakefield would find a place.

But, although the subject has its fascinations, I see no use in being pontifical about it. These stories are meant to please and amuse us. If they do so, well; but, if not, let us relegate them to the top shelf and say no more about it.

E
VERYONE
, I
THINK
, has an innate love of the supernatural. Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny-sheeted ghoul in hiding somewhere.

I invariably go through this ceremony myself. Of course we all know there are no such things—but someone might be going to play us a trick, you know; and anyhow it’s best to be quite sure.

People do tell such very odd stories. Such is the substance of most people’s expressed views about ghosts, as heard either in the course of conversation, or in debating—where the subject is discussed on the average once in two halves—and the opener is credulous, and “every speaker tells his tale,” and one audacious mortal opposes—rarely more. I pity that rash individual when he seeks his couch.

Some classes of ghost stories it is very hard, seriously speaking, not to believe. Omens, Family Tokens and Forewarnings are of this sort.

Here is one, “never before published,” told me by an old man “who was there at the time.” I suppress names.

In the early part of last century, the wife of the squire of a certain village was driving across her park on the way to a county ball. The evening was gray and misty. [This goes without saying.]

Suddenly she looked out of the carriage window and “
saw suffen
”; as to what the something was my old man would not venture a statement. I gathered, however, that it was the lady’s “double.”

One of the horses broke loose, the other turned straight back to the Hall.

The lady never went out of the house again except in her coffin. [Impressive silence.] Of course my informant didn’t go to believe no such thing; but still, there was the story.

One really authentic one, which I fear a good many people must know, and I will lay my unquiet pen.

To be short: General Blucher was returning home alone from the wars. On entering the house he saw, sitting at the fire in a peculiar attitude, his parents—long since dead, and his sisters sitting around the room.

On greeting them he received no answer.

One of his sisters rose and touched him. He swooned, and when he came to himself was alone.

He was for some days delirious, but in a lucid interval, feeling himself at the point of death, he sent for his sovereign, told him the facts: said his sister had warned him he was to die that day, and so expired.

The aspect of my furniture is so terrific at this point that I really must stop.

I am painfully aware that my last effort on this subject was meager and abrupt in the extreme. But this, I have no doubt, everyone who took the trouble to read it, perceived for himself.

It strikes me after a perusal of several books of tales of the supernatural, that no really adequate collection of them has yet appeared; including, as it should, the best both of fiction and of real life. Such a book would be almost as hard to produce as a good hymn book.

First, the compiler must be particular in his choice, for the numberless “well authenticated” ghost stories one meets with in the ordinary collections have a certain sameness about them which tells after awhile.

We all know how, in 18—, Mrs. C—, a respectable lady residing in the small town of D—, was one day sitting by an open window looking out into a small garden in front of the house; and how she saw her nephew—at
that moment in India—walking up a gravel path leading to the front door; and how she exclaimed “That’s Johnny,” when he instantly disappeared; and how the next mail brought the news of his death, which had occurred at the precise moment at which she had seen the apparition.

So much for the commonest form of story.

It is desirable, too, that the teller of these tales should assume the tone of one who believes in the truth of what he is relating. (I fear, by the way, that I have transgressed my own rule.)

And he should stoop occasionally to the incredible, by which I mean the sort of tale which deals in blood and bones, and sheeted specters, and other phenomena in the nature of walking undertakers’ advertisements, though the term “incredible” must not be understood to apply to the following story, for which I can produce perfectly unexceptionable evidence, possessing as I do, an intimate acquaintance with the sources and reliability of “all and sundry the incidents therein contained and expressed as hereinafter followeth”:

A “belated wanderer” arrived at a country village too late to procure a lodging for the night. As the season was summer, and the night fine, he determined to sleep out-of-doors, and actuated by some inexplicable impulse, he pitched his camp in the churchyard.

He laid himself down under a buttress on the north side of the building, and in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was surrounded by the graves of murderers and suicides (who were there, as is often the case, buried on the north side of the church), he fell asleep.

After awhile he awoke with a dim and unpleasant consciousness that something was pulling at his clothes. Rather startled at this, he hastily got up and looked around him.

Above him the moon was shining, through the windows of the tower, and the bells stood out sharply and clearly against it. Beyond the churchyard he could see hills and woods, and in the valley below him a broad still mere on which the moon was shining.

So after admiring the view for some minutes he was just composing himself to sleep again, when the moonlight caught an object nearer to him—almost at his feet in fact.

Nothing less than two glassy eyes belonging to a form that crouched there in the long grass. It was covered with what looked like a stained and
tattered shroud, and he could dimly discern its long skinny-clawed hands, eager, as it seemed, to grasp something.

Further particulars did not possess sufficient interest to detain him. The terms “walked,” “ran,” or even “proceeded” are scarcely adequate to express the pace at which he put distance between himself and the churchyard.

Suffice it to say he left.

I began this paper with the intention of recounting in it several narratives of a thrilling nature, but space forbids. I can only apologize for the deceptive title and incoherent contents of what I have written, and make an end
quam celerrime
.

S
T
. B
ERTRAND DE
C
OMMINGES
is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagnères-de-Luchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists.

In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world place—I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not a thousand inhabitants. He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially from Toulouse to see St. Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends, who were less keen archaeologists than himself, in their hotel at Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning. Half-an-hour at the church would satisfy
them
, and all three could then pursue their journey in the direction of Auch.

But our Englishman had come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself to fill a notebook and to use several dozens of plates in the process of describing and photographing every corner of the wonderful church that dominates the little hill of Comminges.

In order to carry out this design satisfactorily, it was necessary to monopolize the verger of the church for the day. The verger or sacristan (I prefer the latter appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge. And when he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of study.